Alumni Events Around the World

The largest solo exhibition in the United States in more than a decade of the work of internationally-renowned artist Dinh Q. Lê, this exhibition of five major video and photography installations entwines rarely heard narratives of war and migration from people in North Vietnam, the Vietnamese diaspora, and refugees who, like Lê, have returned to live in their home country. Assembling these obscure stories through the collection of found photographs, artists’ war sketches, and oral histories, Lê presents a multifaceted story about Vietnamese life before, during, and after the Vietnam War. In the process, he questions the viability of collective memory and reveals the effects of trauma on the cultural imagination.

ACC has provided support to the San Jose Museum of Art for this exhibition.

Dress Up, Speak Up is a multimedia exhibition exploring the role of costuming, iconography, and performance in constructing Identity and confronting history. With over 35 participating artists representing 22 nationalities, Dress Up, Speak Up delivers a global investigation of these concepts, while reconfiguring, reimagining, and reconstituting history to explore the legacy of European colonialism.

Japonismes 2018: les âmes en resonance, an unprecedented celebration of Japanese culture that will unfold across France starting in July. For eight months, Japan’s finest culture will be showcased in Paris, the city of art, and other parts of the country on an epic, all-embracing scale. This grand event represents the Government of Japan’s largest endeavor to share Japanese culture with the world, a flagship project for making culture a pillar of our country’s diplomatic engagement.

Bamboo is celebrated by architects for its structural, economic, and ecological properties, but it retains troubling connotations. We associate it with “primitive” huts and kitschy tourist attractions. It tends to reinforce an Orientalist fantasy of Southeast Asian architecture, distracting from the authentic contemporary vernacular of the region, which is a vibrant collage of cement and plastic, decorated by fluorescent lights and building-sized inkjet prints.

Savinee Buranasilapin and Tom Dannecker of thingsmatter, set out to invent a shape that is the opposite of a hut, in order to give bamboo an image makeover. Instead of small and enclosed, Ligature stretches out in three low-slung arches to form a wide, open pavilion. It defines space without containing it, framing eccentric, non-orthogonal views of its environment. It defies gravity by gripping the ground horizontally, rather than piercing the sky vertically.

Ligature is voluptuous and asymmetrical, its shape estimated with software, but executed by human hands with irregular, imperfect bamboo, in concert with steel pipes, wire ties, and plywood friction plates. Several thousand joints are fastened with the most important tool of our time: the nail gun. The result is neither a showcase of folksy handicraft nor a pristine example of CNC formalism, but an honest, contemporary, human artifact which reveals its own making.

The international art exhibition will take place at 20 venues across various well-known sites, including ancient temples along Bangkok’s principle river, the Chao Phraya River, historic architectural sites and iconic landmarks, and art and cultural institutions. 75 artists and groups from 34 countries (half of them from Thailand) are selected by international curatorial team.

Under the theme of Beyond Bliss, the artists are invited to create the art works under the concept and interpret the seemingly unattainable happiness in different ways. Creating the art piece at the historical, cultural and spiritual landmarks, representing the pursuit for happiness, both physical and mental, or finding the end of suffering. They also reflect social, political and environmental issues through the art works that have great impact to human happiness.

In Jen Bervin’s large-scale installation River, a hand-sewn model of the Mississippi River in silver sequins, you see the river reversed, mapped from the geocentric perspective— from inside the earth’s interior looking up at the riverbed. The scale is one inch to one mile. It took twelve years to make, and the same amount of time to sew each section of river that it would to walk the real one. The artist sewed the 230 curvilinear feet long sculpture by hand, including each of the thousands of reflective, silver sequins that densely cover the surface. The archipelagoes of the delta, south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, are mirrored. Wherever the piece is exhibited, the people and the space around them will be reflected. The first exhibition of the entire piece will be installed on the ceiling of the I.M. Pei space at the Des Moines Art Center in October 2018, curated by Alison Ferris.

Drawing Reverberation, a solo exhibition featuring paintings, drawings and wood carving works made in recent years by artist and alumni Firoz Mahmud. While currently based in New York City, Mahmud (b. 1974) continues to draw artistic themes from the history of the Bangladeshi region in which he is deeply rooted. To ponder and recognize the relevance of these themes, Ota Fine Arts Singapore presents a survey of the artist's recent practice.

To see more about the exciting things Firoz is doing, see his website.